Late last year, New York Assembly member Alex Bores became the target of a campaign by a pro-AI super PAC to thwart his congressional bid. The group, Leading the Future, is armed with more than one hundred million dollars from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, AI search startup Perplexity, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Bores’ response was simple: bring it on.
Now, he has the muscle to back that challenge up. Public First Action, a PAC backed by a twenty-million-dollar donation from Anthropic, is spending four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to boost Bores in the race for New York’s 12th congressional district. Like its rival, the committee is pro-AI, but it is pitching a different vision, one centered on transparency, safety standards, and public oversight.
Meanwhile, the industry-backed PAC, Leading the Future, has already poured one point one million dollars into ads attacking Bores. This is largely because he sponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which requires major AI developers to disclose safety protocols and report serious misuse of their systems.